Read Flicker for Free Online Page A

critical knocks, put-downs, temperamental jabs. They hurt. But nothing hurt more than her ban upon tenderness. I sometimes ached to confess my real affection. Nevertheless, though I wasn’t permitted to speak of it (and if I had, it would have been with a clumsiness she despised) I wasn’t too green to know there wassomething rare and supremely precious between us—a marriage of mind and body.
    There are two things movie fans around the world would one day come to know about Clarissa Swann. First, that she was a brilliant critic and stylist. Second, that she could be a pitiless butcher in an argument. The agility of her mind, the slashing acerbity of her wit are on public display in every line she ever wrote. But there was one thing I alone would know about the Clare who was, when I met her, a bitter and bitchy Nobody still years away from becoming the bitter and bitchy Somebody whose reviews would one day grace the pages of
The New York Times.
She could be generous to a fault, at least to someone who came to her, as I did, in submissive awe. Clare always needed an admiring audience, if only an audience of one. Adulation brought out the best in her, which was her honest passion to teach. That virtue was, however, mixed with a pugnacious need to flatten disagreement, to assail and destroy those who questioned her views. In the presence of resistance, she gave no quarter. Ridicule, sarcasm, insult became permissible weapons. But this was only because she
cared
about movies fanatically. In her life, the defense of cinematic excellence was a cause of supreme importance. She’d created her critical standards against fierce opposition and had suffered because of them.
    When, in the mid-forties, she entered Barnard as a freshman, Clare precociously sought to merge her youthful love of film with the literary studies she chose as her major. In that period, the universities were adamantly closed to the vulgarity of mere movies. After all, what could Milton have in common with Mickey Mouse? Accordingly, Clare found herself penalized by hidebound academics whenever she dared to bring film into her classwork. The opposition of the day was unbudging; no one would admit the academic legitimacy of her interest. Before her sophomore year was finished, she quit college in an act of intellectual rebellion. The sting of that early rejection never healed. Years later, when her cause had been more than vindicated in the universities, part of her continued to live in those scorning classrooms, fighting old battles with smug professors for whom the printed word was the last word in culture.
    When the war ended, she spent the remainder of the forties in Paris soaking up the lively appreciation of film that has characterized the French intelligentsia since the days of Louis Lumière. She worked (unpaid) as usher, ticket seller, concierge in the
ciné
clubs that beganto reappear after the war. After two or three years of drudgery, she managed to become a research assistant (again unpaid) at the Cinémathèque, the mecca of the Parisian film community. There she quickly attached herself to the circle of New Wave theorists then forming around the influential French critic André Bazin. Her own education in film unfolded amid the raucous debates she heard waged in the clubs by the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais. Eventually, thanks to a boost from the admiring Bazin, she picked up still another unpaid position editing and then writing—in French—for the landmark journal
Cahiers du Cinema.
In this way, she acquired the distinctive Gallic intensity that would lend her work its peculiar appeal—though fortunately without the Gallic pomposity that frequently comes with it.
    Somewhere along the line she met Sharkey, who, as Clare told it, was little more than an expatriate bum haunting the cafes of the Left Bank, and their always uneasy lust and disgust partnership began. With money from her parents, Clare bankrolled